Jay-Z's Big Samsung Album Release Was a Disaster

Jay-Z's hyped-to-death new album Magna Carta Holy Grail was set to finally drop last night for a million lucky Samsung Galaxy users, except things didn't go as planned when the special app was supposed to unlock the album at 12:01 a.m. ET.

Jay-Z's hyped-to-death new album Magna Carta Holy Grail was set to finally drop last night for a million lucky Samsung Galaxy users, except things didn't go as planned when the special app was supposed to unlock the album at 12:01 a.m. ET. The clock finally ticked past midnight Wednesday night (or was it Thursday morning?) and the God MC's new album was finally, supposedly available to the world. Except so many people were flooding the app with download requests that it crashed, leaving many people who stayed up late to have the first opinions, which are obviously the most important kind of opinions, about Magna Carta were left in the cold.

"Disappointed fanatics hit Twitter crying foul with a exciting rollout that didn't work as advertised. Many Samsung users were left without the album they were expecting," MTV's Rob Markman reports. Listeners were forced to tune into Funk Master Flex's radio show on New York's Hot 97 to hear the album for the first time. Flex delivered one of his epic rants before playing the album in its entirety well into the wee hours of Thursday morning. Complex gathered a collection of Twitter's first reactions here, mostly from people who were tuning in via Flex's show.

The first single, "Holy Grail" featuring Justin Timberlake, was posted to the biggest rap blogs pretty quickly. As Samsung got its act together Thursday morning, users who downloaded the app were eventually able to hear the album when they woke up for breakfast. Whether or not Magna Carta Holy Grail is Kingdom Come or a Black Album on Jay-Z's record, well, we'll have to wait. For now, there's some Reasonable Doubt.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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Connor Simpson is a former staff writer for The Wire. His work has appeared in Business Insider and City Lab.